Research Catalog

Title

Black and white and blue : adult cinema from the Victorian age to the VCR / Dave Thompson.

Author

Thompson, Dave, 1960 January 3-

Publication

Toronto : ECW Press, c2007.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Details

Description

xviii, 301 p. : ill.; 23 cm.

Summary

"The films that society has termed pornographic movies have been with us for over a century now, since the first flickering kinetoscopes stumbled into life in 1889. Yet beyond a handful of scholarly tracts, and a few glancing references in certain Hollywood histories, there is no modern history of the subject available. Black and White and Blue fills that void. Taking as its cut-off point the late 1970s, when the advent of the home VCR irrevocably changed the face of the adult film industry, Black and White and Blue celebrates a world of anonymously masked women and curiously black-sock-clad men, whose movie immortality was attained in the time it took to exhaust a roll of film. There were no artificial breasts when the first stags were made, no tattooed and pierced members, and no concept of trick photography. We revisit a time when dingy back street cinemas aired their wares beneath a "members only" sign, and a climate in which the police waited as patiently to bust the participants as audiences queued to watch them, while "polite society" looked on in (often hypocritical) disgust, unable to believe that filth like this even existed. With exclusive interviews, descriptions of over 300 films, and a conversational style, this book will represent a complete and in-depth survey of the adult film, from shaky, flickering black-and-white silents to the first flowering of the lavish modern-day production."--Pub. desc

Subjects

• History
• Sex in motion pictures > History
• Pornographic films > History

Genre/Form

History

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references (p. 263-271).
• Filmography: p. 273-301.

Processing Action (note)

• committed to retain

Contents

Foreword -- In Praise of the Dirty Picture House vii -- Chapter 1 The Flesh That Flickers 1 -- Chapter 2 Dance the Coochee Coochee 13 -- Chapter 3 The Lure of the Secret Cinema 25 -- Chapter 4 In Praise of Unnatural Acts 37 -- Chapter 5 Lewdness and the Law 51 -- Chapter 6 Rudeness, Raunch and Revolution 59 -- Chapter 7 Weird Scenes Inside the Cat House 71 -- Chapter 8 The Sweet Smell of Vinegar 87 -- Chapter 9 Eureka! Mastophallation! 99 -- Chapter 10 The Melty Man and Other Non-myths 117 -- Chapter 11 Don't You Know There's a War On? 127 -- Chapter 12 Love on the Home Front 139 -- Chapter 13 Damned Dirty Stuff! 149 -- Chapter 14 Celebrity Skin 161 -- Chapter 15 Read It in Books 179 -- Chapter 16 That's Not Porn, It's Psychology 191 -- Chapter 17 Man Meets Machine 199 -- Chapter 18 The English Disease 217 -- Chapter 19 I Am Curious -- Red, White and Blue 233 -- Chapter 20 Deep Thoughts 249.

ISBN

• 9781550227918 (pbk.)
• 1550227912 (pbk.)

LCCN

^^2007408134

OCLC

• 145097346
• SCSB-12132634

Owning Institutions

Harvard Library